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ROBERT COLES
to describe it is done clearly and with compassion. We are taken to
the Jewish ghetto in London, dying yet twitching still with life and
with memories for the susceptible visitor. In four essays we are ex–
posed to South Africa's uniquely tragic and disastrous racial situation,
and in two more we hear about Israel from one of
its
exiles. The
author is at his very best in dealing with ironic situations, as in the
resemblance of a crowd lunging after visiting royalty to a racist mob;
the reactions of whites as they watch a native African festival; the
strange twist of history which makes Israel no solution for the problems
of the Diaspora, making in certain ways Jewish identity-in the con–
tinuing "abroad" that is the world outside Israel-more emphatic, even
less defined, still puzzling. All through these three parts the essays
are both simple and tightly organized, the decency and charity of the
writer always present, and
his
essential good sense, his lucidity of
mind a pleasure to encounter.
Of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Jacobson says: "I am not sure whether
we can learn more from the book's faults than from its merits; but
I am sure at least that we can learn something from our own mis–
guided insistance, over these many years, that the book has no merit
at all." He goes on to wonder whether "our revulsi.on from Tom
doesn't spring in part from an uneasy fear that his way of asserting
his
humanity might be as effective as any other way open to him–
or to us." He goes on to make his critical judgment: "Stowe never
fully imagined that the day would come when Negroes would read
her novel and comment upon it ... [and) this failure of imagination
is a crucial one; and one for which she is less and less likely to be
forgiven in the future." Yet, he concludes wryly with these words:
"We can trust her sufficiently to say that she would not have minded
this at all."
These are the words of one who understands the relationship
be–
tween the individual and the historical moment. We act out of our
lives and make history; but we act
in
history, too. To denounce from
the perfections of a later period the "failure" of a book which was
itself striving toward that period, to see its malicious "influence"
retrospectively rather than its contextual meaning, its still partial
relevance, and certainly its integrity is to abandon, Jacobson feels,
one's vision and one's humanity.
Jacobs.on's feeling for the humane comes through again in
his
treatment of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. The dismaying mis–
application of psychiatric theory and nomenclature to literature
has
hardly left the relationship of Huck and Jim untouched. Who can
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